Application example 003 - Food processing

Summary description :
The customer built a new custom-made food processing machine and wanted precise and reliable control of dispensed ingredients.

Specific challenges:
Precision of measured quantities was the main challenge as raw material cost is very high. Also, a recipe based system had to be implemented as up to 1000 different products can be manufactured. An ARCOM Media-GX SBC equipped with QNX 4 was chosen, along with ISaGRAF as the application core. QNX's reliability with ISaGRAF's flexibility ensured the customer exact product dispensing, down to a fraction of grams, at every cycle.

Specifications:
-Control at 20 ms, both discrete and motion;
-About 30 I/O hooked up to local cards on the ARCOM SBC;
-1 HMI client station for visualisation and communication to remote server;
-Recipe database running on an external server;
-OPC connectivity between the ISaGRAF controller and HMI system.